PEOPLE from outside Northern Ireland tend to marvel at the pettiness of the disputes that divide society here. Indeed many here and in the Republic are as bewildered.
The current cause of division between partners in government, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin, concerns the signage in the big bright new bus and train station in Belfast.
In Dublin, the main railway station is named after James Connolly one of the revolutionaries of the Easter Rising of 1916. No one insisted on the new station in Belfast honouring any past martyrs though, no doubt, many republicans would love it to be named after Bobby Sands or Martin McGuinness.
It took the anodyne title Grand Central Station, which echoes the name of a big new hotel, and recalls the name of a much more famous Grand Central, long demolished, where the Beatles stayed when they came to Belfast.
No doubt a committee sat down and discussed how they might name this new station without annoying anyone.
They didn’t even succeed in that, for the moaners complain that it isn’t central at all. In fact, accessing it through temporary hoardings and bleak alleyways probably creates the expectation in visitors new to it that they are making their way to an embarrassing slum.
There is a lot that is wrong with the new station. The stepped entrance on Grosvenor Road has no parking space in front of it. Because of work around it drivers that dared to stop there and drop someone off have to continue on up the road, away from town or do a dodgy U turn in traffic.
I could go on. Translink, the transport company insisted on the need to demolish a little bridge over the railway line. This bridge had two things going for it in the eyes of its defenders. One was that it was named after the Boyne, the river that William of Orange crossed in 1690 to defeat the Catholic King James.
The other, of lesser significance to some, is that an awful lot of traffic used the bridge, and closing forced it to detour through the city centre at rush hour producing enormous congestion.
So, politicians needed little imagination to come up with criticisms of the new station that would signal to the electorate that they shared their concerns.
So what did they come up with? Language. The language on the signage, the big bright blue, backlit rectangle in the main hallway that tells you where to get your bus or train.
It’s in English. Now everyone in Belfast speaks English. It is the language migrants have to learn if they are to get about, do their shopping, find work.
But language is about more than communication; it’s a marker of identity.
And Belfast being in Ireland, many argue that the bus station’s signage should be in Irish, to acknowledge the Irish identity of the native people who were, they say, stripped of their native tongue and forced down the centuries to learn English.
There is a significant revival of Irish taking place in Northern Ireland now.
The recently appointed Sinn Féin minister for infrastructure, Liz Kimmins, decided that the bright new signage in the bright new station should be replaced with bi-lingual English/Irish signage.
The DUP has taken offence at this, resting its case largely on the needless expense involved. The combined cost of the old signage and the replacement signage will come to about a quarter of a million pounds.
Which in even a regional executive’s budget isn’t a lot.
Irish nationalists say, come off it, this is blatant prejudice against our ancient mother tongue.
And even some unionists on social media have agreed with that.
There is clear movement towards extending the reach of Irish usage and tuition beyond the nationalist communities.
Irish language campaigners however make two points that seem to me to contradict each other. One the one hand they say, this is our heritage, long reviled, and we have a right to recover it.
This argument clearly identifies the Irish language with the Irish nationalist tradition. And it is only the nationalist parties that are promoting it.
Irish is a statutory language in Northern Ireland now. There is to be a commissioner to promote it. Official documents will be translated into it.
Streets in Belfast can vote to have dual language signage. This is also contentious since, it being a minority language, the city council has decided that only a minority of residents - 15% - need request a bilingual sign, and this has annoyed majorities in some streets.
Irish language activists say there is nothing to fear from the Irish language, and this doesn’t need to be a culture war because the language belongs to everyone.
Well, it doesn’t actually belong to anyone who doesn’t want it.
Irish is official in the Republic but it is contentious there too because learning it in school is compulsory and there have been complaints that too many people are being allowed to opt out of it.
In a united Ireland, if it comes, unionists will be faced with the prospect of their children being obliged to learn Irish at school or the rest of Ireland will have to drop that compulsion as a concession to them.
The resolve to fight for the language in the streets and in the bus station augurs more contention to come.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books
See More: Belfast, DUP, Irish Language, Sinn Féin
